It is a mark of Trump’s diminishing standing among his fellow party members that several GOP members of Congress have chipped in and bought themselves a spine, and declared the budget “dead on arrival.” However, the moribund status of Trump’s proposal has not prevented a spirited –nay, dare I say, feisty?—defense of this latest manifestation of Trumpism by a variety of surrogates from the Office of Management and Budget, Congress, and various “think” tanks. And from Mick Mulvaney on down, these apologists have glommed onto one particular talking point with alarming alacrity. In defending their slash and burn budget, they claim that they are “showing compassion to the taxpayer” by cutting federal programs to the bone. It is not fair, they declare, to expect hardworking middle-class tax payers to continue footing the bill for the lazy slugs who are sucking undeserved milk from a worn out public teat. Fully 45% of American households do not pay income taxes! Why should we subsidize them?

In other words, they’ve cynically split American citizenry into two camps: makers and takers. On a certain gut level, this argument seems to make sense. You work your butt off, this line of reasoning goes, so why should you pay for free breakfast and medical insurance for the illegitimate spawn of a feckless welfare queen? And the legitimacy of this position appears to be bolstered by the additional fact that approximately 45% of American households do not pay federal income taxes. But the very ire that this stance provokes in the listener—that sting from the enormity of this insulting injustice—is precisely what should make you pause and consider the legitimacy of the argument. Remember: logic is boring, dull, and analytical. It should rarely make you need to reach for an extra dose of your blood pressure medication. If an argument leaves you feeling absolutely murderous, then you need to see if it is grounded in logic, or if it is mired in knee-jerk provoking emotionalism.

So, let’s put on our Spock ears and look dispassionately at what they’re saying. Personally, I think there are at several logically sound reasons for rejecting Mulvaney’s argument.

First, that 45% figure that’s bandied about is interesting as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really go that far. For example, it doesn’t include all of the other taxes that people pay: even if you don’t pay federal income taxes, the chances are pretty great that you do pay some combination of payroll, state, property, excise, sales, sin, and gas taxes. According to Roberton Williams, an analyst for the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, the actual percentage of people who pay no taxes is actually closer to 1%.[1] Pretty much all of us are makers, as it turns out. Similarly, many of the households who didn’t pay federal income taxes had taken advantage of various deductions and credits that they were entitled to because Congress decided to use the tax code as a mechanism for carrying out important social policies, such as encouraging home ownership or giving to charities or making sure that the working poor can afford to go to work or keeping your granddad out of the poorhouse[2] or deciding that families that make less than $20,000 probably have too much shit on their plate already to worry about paying taxes. You know, compassion.

Second, let’s just look a bit at who is eating the federal pie. According to their really pretty pie chart, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) found that in Fiscal Year 2015, the federal government spent $3.7 trillion, of which $3.2 trillion was from taxes and the rest from loans. In that year, 16% of the federal budget went to defense, 24% went to Social Security, 25% (or $938 billion) went to Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP[3] , and ACA marketplace subsidies, and 10% went to Safety Net programs. Debt, vets, transportation, education, science and medical research, non-security related international programs, and miscellaneous crap made up the rest of the expenses (about 25%). Now, you might tot up the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, marketplace, and safety net programs and think, “Holy shit!! The poor really are sucking up all of the federal resources.” But slow down, okay? First of all, Social Security, including Social Security Disability Insurance, is an insurance program, and current recipients have contributed to the program through their payrolltax contributions. Second, of the 25% of the federal budget that went to paying for the poor’s health bill, two-thirds went to Medicare—which is available to all Americans over the age of 65, both rich and poor: all you have to do is pay in and hope you make it to 65. Social Security and Medicare are not programs for the poor.

But let’s be truly Scrooge-ish in our analysis and do our best to root out the freebooters in Granny’s nursing home. In 2015, 24% of Medicare recipients were at or under 200% of federal poverty levels. However, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 41% of Medicare payments come from general federal revenues, while 38% was from pay roll taxes, 13% from beneficiary premiums, and the rest from state transfers, interests, and the ubiquitous but tantalizingly vague “other.”[4]Part A of Medicare, which covers hospital, nursing home, hospital, and home care, is the most expensive part of Medicare ($261.2 billion), and, guess what: in 2014, only 1% of the Part A bill was paid for through income taxes! The bulk of Medicare payments that were covered by federal income taxes were under Medicare B and D. These two programs totaled $338 billion, of which $253.5 billion (or 75%) is paid for by federal tax dollars.[5] So, if we assume that 24% of that $253.5 billion was spent on the elderly poor, then the total of federal tax dollars spent on the poor for Medicare B and D is $63.4 billion. Add in the $633 million the feds chip in to the poor in Medicare A (25% of $2.5 billion in federal income taxes paid under Part A), the total payments to the poor under Medicare that originated from federal income tax is $64 billion.

So, let’s add up the federal income tax dollars that were spent on the poor (in billions of dollars):

Now, let’s see what percentage of federal income tax dollars were actually paid directly to the poor. Taking the $3.7 trillion 2015 total budget as our starting point, I’ll immediately knock out the $938 billion in Social Security because, as I’ve pointed out before, that is funded by payroll taxes. Similarly, I’ll toss out the $343.2 billion for Medicaid that came from non-federal income tax dollars. That leaves us with roughly $2.4 trillion, of which $827.7 billion is 34%. And since in 2015 32% of Americans were at or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Level, I would be inclined to say that seems about right. And here’s a point: if you thought it was unfair for 55% of potential federal income tax payers to subsidize the 45% who don’t pay income tax, then how fair is it for 32% of the population to bear the burden of 60% of the budget cuts?

All of this raises an important question: why focus on the poor if they represent only a third of federal income tax dollars spent? Well, for one thing, it’s easy to pick on the poor. Practically by definition, they are vulnerable to attack, lacking the education, savvy, and resources to defend themselves and their interests. And, let’s face it, we don’t really like the poor. For all our protestations about being a classless society, we have a long, extensive and fairly vile history of abusing and denigrating the poor[9]. They make us feel bad, especially when it turns out that it’s not people’s poor choices that create poverty (or even their state of mind), but ingrained societal inequities, including the failure to provide a living wage and the disproportionate impact of inherited wealth.[10] So when we’re feeling sad and scared and want to blame someone for our shitty state of affairs, the poor make a convenient whipping boy. Perhaps that’s why Trump’s budget really packs a wallop against the same white, rural, poor who voted for him.

But let’s be real here, right? We know what Mulvaney is really trying to do. He’s blowing on his dog whistle. The tendency of white Americans to associate poverty with African-Americans has been well-documented, as has its connection to attacks on welfare systems.[11] Using “poor” as a surrogate for “black” is a time-honored tradition at least since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” in the 1968 presidential campaign—and not just for Republican presidents.[12] And nobody can blow on that particular dog whistle half as well as Donald Trump. He won not despite using overtly racist language, but because of it. So Mulvaney, by picking on the poor, by pitting hard-working “us” against shiftless, feckless “them,” is using the same tactics his boss used to such great success back in November.[13]

Engaging in the debate on Mulvaney’s terms will do nothing to eradicate the inherent racism of his argument, but it would actually play into his hands by deepening the chasm between Trump supporters and reasonable people and hardening the differences of our positions even more. I therefore suggest that we reject Mulvaney’s position in its entirety and refuse to participate in it at all. Instead, we need to replace his emotional appeal with one of our own. And ours, I humbly suggest, would have the double charm of being grounded in fact and patriotism. Hooray!

Basically, there is a division in our country, but it is not between the makers and the takers. Instead, it is between those who see government as a means to provide for the common welfare of all its citizens and those who see it as a way to redistribute funds from the poor to the rich. Reader, I think the choice is obvious, but we need to beat our drums about it more, because there are those who will buy Mulvaney’s false dichotomy and deepen the rifts that are already dangerously close to ripping our nation apart. Sad!

[13] You really need to read the National Book Award winning Stamped from the Beginning by Dr. Ibram X. Kelly of the University of Florida. I mentioned this book in my last blog, but I really can’t recommend it enough if you’re at all interested in the evolution of racist ideas and their role in justifying racist beliefs, actions, and policies.

[14] Because Christ knows they won’t be able to learn anything at their local public school, thanks to Trump’s budget!

]]>deborah1960Presidential Grammar 101: Dynamic, Stative, and Modal Verbshttps://essayettes.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/presidential-grammar-101-dynamic-stative-and-modal-verbs/
Wed, 17 May 2017 02:06:44 +0000http://essayettes.wordpress.com/?p=237]]>Verbs are wonderful. The root of a verb is aptly called “the infinitive” because any given verb can take place at any time: the past, the present, the future. With verbs, we can express actions that occurred in the past but continue into the present (present perfect: Trump has always been a buffoon) or that will take place in the future after something else occurs (future perfect: I hope that Comey will havecompleted his public testimony before Sean Spicer’s ass is fired.) Heck! Verbs are so flexible that we can even use them to express hypotheticals, situations contrary to fact, or wishes (conditional: If Paul Ryan loved his country more than power, he would start impeachment proceedings; and subjunctive: I wish McConnell weren’t such a bald-faced liar and hypocrite.)

So, verbs are gifted with temporal agility, and if that were all they were capable of, I think we could still agree that they are pretty remarkable indeed. However, the true beauty of verbs is their ability to allow us to express a limitless range of physical and mental and emotional actions. In other words, they not only allow us to express what we do, but also what we are—and even what we should. It is this aspect of verbs, which is so fundamental to their nature that it is frequently overlooked, that I wish to examine.

In general, then, there are three basic types of verbs: dynamic, stative, and modal.[1]Dynamic verbs, as their name suggests, involve some type of action, process, or behavior. In other words, it’s what we do. Here are some examples:

Hillary Clinton laughed until she nearly wet herself at the notion that Trump had fired Comey because of the FBI’s bungled investigation of her emails.

Anderson Cooper’s eyes rolled like a wheel of fortune during his interview with Kellyanne Conway.

The hundreds of Benghazi “patriots” who hadgathered in front of the White House to protest Trump’s loosey-goosey sharing of top-top-top secret intelligence with his Russian comrades screamed, “Lock him up!”[2]

Stative verbs, on the other hand, reflect our states of being, or who we are. These include verbs of existence (“Trump is totally irresponsible”); appearance (“Kellyanne seems really shifty”); feelings and emotion (“McMasters really hates lying to the press on behalf of his shit-storm of a boss”); mental processes (“Mitch McConnell forgot the meaning of the phrase ‘checks and balances’); and possession (“To their chagrin, many GOP congressmen own their votes in favor of TrumpRyanCare”). Generally, you don’t use the progressive (continuous) tense[3] with stative verbs. So, for example, you would say “The chocolate cake tastes all right but really it’s nothing to write home about,” but not “The chocolate cake is tasting all right but really it’s nothing to write home about.” However, there are lots and lots of stative verbs that can also be dynamic.[4] Here’s an example of what I mean:

Sean Spicer lies to the press (stative: he always does it).

Sean Spicer is lying to the press again (dynamic: he is currently in the act of lying).

Sean Spicer is lying prostrate on the rug after the daily briefing (dynamic: using a different meaning of the verb “to lie”).

“To be” can, under certain circumstances be either stative or dynamic, depending on how it’s used:

Sean Spicer is a liar (stative: he always is a liar)

Sean Spicer is being a liar (dynamic: right now, at this moment, Sean Spicer is lying).[5]

“To have” can also be dynamic or stative:

I have had a nasty case of nausea since November 9, 2016 (stative: possession)

I am having a particularly nasty case of nausea right now (dynamic: I am in the process of being sick right now).

However, even though they can behave similarly,[6] they really do not mean the same thing. Consider the difference between these two sentences:

“As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts”

“As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which is absolutely right to do, facts”

Now, as delightfully refreshing as it is to see Trump dealing in facts, even in the most unfortunate of circumstances, I think we can agree that the first sentence (his actual tweet) is quite different from the second sentence (which is what I think he wishes we would think he said). To have the right to do something does not mean that it is right to do it. You would think that was obvious, but, well, you know. Trump.

But this exploration between having a right and being right—the difference between “can” and “ought,” in other words–makes a nice segue to modal verbs. Modal verbs are words that express degrees of necessity and possibility. They include could, should, would, ought, may, might, can, shall, will, and must. Hardly anyone (besides English teachers and other grammar enthusiasts, that is) realizes that these words are verbs at all. They simply don’t act like normal verbs; hell, they don’t even have an infinitive form (there is no “to must”). When diagramming a sentence with modal verbs, most students just scratch their heads and wonder where in the world the goddamned predicate is.

Yet, in many ways, the modal verb is what makes civilization possible. They establish our bounds, and also act as a reality check. When joined by “have”, could, would, and should allow us to evaluate our past actions, and enable us to learn from our mistakes. They really are the most marvelous words. But don’t just take my word for it: look at these incredibly useful examples to see what I mean!

A president may disclose top secret information to a traditional enemy, but perhaps he oughtn’t.

A president could choose to share top secret information with a traditional enemy, but he should not do it just to prove how cool his intelligence sources are.

The Russian officials must have been beside themselves with joy when they received the top secret information from the president.

The next time the president thinks about sharing top secret information with the Russians, he might want to remember that he has a duty to the citizens of his country to act in their best interests.

So, that’s it, then. Dynamic, stative, and modal. Now, you might be thinking that all this is nice, but has nothing to do with real life. Reader, I could not disagree more. If you think about it, looking closely at these verbs should remind us about the difference between our thoughts and our actions, between innate qualities that cannot be changed and attitudes that can be, between the things we can do and the things that we ought (or ought not). That’s because our words and the rules that govern them are not separate from ourselves and our actions, but are entwined in them. We once had a president who understood that, and chose his words carefully as a result. Alas, that is no longer the case. So, if the current president won’t pay attention to his words, then we have no choice but to do it for him. Sad!

[1] Yes, yes, yes. I know that there are auxiliary verbs (AKA “helping verbs”)—to have, to do, and to be. But when these verbs are functioning as auxiliary verbs, they are used to just change the tense of verbs. In other words, they perform a purely grammatical function. So screw them—they’re boring. But please note that I said “functioning as auxiliary verbs” because all of these auxiliary verbs can be dynamic, and two of them can be stative and dynamic (but no prizes for guessing which ones). Verbs. As slippery as the slope the GOP is pushing us down.

[3] The continuous or progressive tense is formed by joining some form of the verb “to be” with the present participle (-ing) of the verb in question. Here’s what I mean:

Past continuous: Donald Trump was eating the most delicious piece of chocolate cake when he shared state secrets with the waiters at Mar-a-Lago.

Present continuous: Right now, Donald Trump is eating the most delicious piece of chocolate cake while sharing state secrets with the waiters at Mar-a-Lago.

Future continuous: Without a doubt, Donald Trump will be eating the most delicious piece of chocolate cake the next time he shares state secrets with the waiters at Mar-a-Lago.

[4] Well, of course there are. This IS English grammar we’re discussing, after all!

[5] However, you need to be careful—there are some conditions that are so innate that you cannot convert them to a dynamic state. So, you can say “Donald Trump is a narcissist,” but not “Donald Trump is being a narcissist.” That’s because Trump’s narcissism is the very core of his personality, and not something that he can turn on or off like a faucet.

[6] And now you know which two auxiliary verbs are both stative and dynamic! Good for you!

]]>deborah1960How to Tell BF from BShttps://essayettes.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/how-to-tell-bf-from-bs/
Tue, 25 Apr 2017 18:51:23 +0000http://essayettes.wordpress.com/?p=220]]>A recent op-ed article in the New York Times raised an interesting (and eponymous) question: has Trump stolen philosophy’s critical tools? The author, Casey Williams, argues that some of the blame for Trump’s rather casual relationship with the truth lies in some measure with the philosophers, literary critics, and social scientists who have chipped away at the notion that truth can in any way be deemed objective, universal, and unquestionable. In a world where the one universally acknowledged truth is that the truth cannot be known, it is a short hop, skip, and a jump to proclaiming the legitimacy of “alt-truth.” Certainly, truth is subjective. If nothing else, neuroscience has established that the evidence of our eyes and of our memory is anything but reliable. A quick peek at Neuroscience News reveals how researchers are learning how fragile, friable, and fantastical our memories—so critical to our understanding of “truth”–are. Trump therefore cannot be lying, because there cannot be such a thing as the truth. Instead of lies, Trump is merely recasting his version of the truth, or rather, is positing one of an infinite possible truths. This situation raises the hitherto unthinkable possibility that Trump is a b.f. (bona fide—good faith) philosopher, and not a b.s. (bullus shittus) artist.

And yet this prospect doesn’t sit well with me, and I think Williams finds it a quite uncomfortable notion, too. Indeed, he ends by stating that the only way for us to determine the legitimacy (or otherwise) of Trump’s pronouncements is for us to use critical thinking skills. After all, philosophy and truth-seeking should be supported by sound reasoning, right? So, let’s put on our Critical Thinking Caps and do it! Let’s root out rotten reasoning!

First, intentions should matter. And something tells me that Trump’s intentions are not pure. Someone who acknowledges the possibility of a subjective truth, and who rejects the notion of a universal truth, tends to be anti-authoritarian. If you have a nuanced view of the world, and are willing to accept that there is, indeed, more than one way to skin a cat,[1] then you are far less likely to attempt to impose your world view upon others. This is evident in literary criticism, which by its very nature encourages the reader to develop personal interpretations of texts. Analyzing a canonical work such as Othello through a feminist lens, for example, enables us to view the characters of Emilia and Desdemona as far more critical (and interesting) than if we simply accept the heavy-handed traditional view that the female characters are merely stock figures whose sole purpose in the play is to move the plot along. Similarly, adopting different ways of viewing the world might make one a bit more sensitive to the impact of history upon current events. So, for example, one might be a tad more willing to concede the importance of asserting that “black lives matter” if one looked at the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and lynching through the eyes of African Americans. I know that if I were African American, I would be a bit shrill in asserting my right to exist in the face of a power structure that has done everything possible to downplay the importance of black lives.[2] Absolutists, on the other hand, appear to have no difficulty with declaring that their point of view is the correct position to take. Frankly, there is nothing in Trump’s biography, rhetoric, or actions to support the idea that he is a subtle observer of the human condition. Indeed, I think that Trump himself would scoff at the idea that he really need to see things from another person’s point of view. Atticus Finch he is not.[3] At the very least, his sweeping generalizations indicate that he is a man who sees the world in absolute terms.

But even if we assume that Trump’s intentions are as pure as Sir Galahad, and that Trump were posing an alternative truth instead of a downright lie, there should still be some relationship to the “truth” he is refuting. Let’s look at the example Williams used: Trump’s tweet in response to the increased heat generated by the investigation into Russian interference with the election. Here it is, in all its glory:

Now, you might look high, and you might look low, but there is nothing in this statement that is in any way relevant to the question of just how far up his puppet Putin’s hands go.[4] This lack of a logical relationship between the statement (“Putin really had his hand way, way, WAY up his puppet!”) and the refutation (“Obama bugged me!”) can be either intentional (a red herring) or inadvertent (ignoratio elenchi)[5]. But either way, as any Critical Thinking Teacher worth her salt can tell you, this disconnection is a fatal flaw to the argument Trump is making, because all it does is throw sand into the reader’s eyes. Instead of shedding light on the matter at hand, Trump is obscuring it. Blurts do not sound reasoning make.

But mostly, Trump’s rhetoric is simply not consistent with typical philosophical discourse. Can any among you honestly say that The Critique of Pure Reason was simply un-put-down-able? Or that Of Grammatology was a real page turner? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Of course not. And there is an excellent reason for this: philosophical writings are intellectual, rational, and about as exciting to read as paint can labels. That’s why most people don’t read them and instead use Sparknotes.[6]

Now, there are many things you can call Trump’s rhetoric, but “dry” and “intellectual” certainly aren’t among them. Look at these examples to see what I mean:

They are not identical in tone or subject. In that first quotation, Trump’s New Year’s greeting manages to conflate love and vague threats to his “enemies” in a rather memorable –and disturbing—manner, while the repeated references to the greatness of his wall in the second quotation brings to mind the hubristic musings of an illiterate eight-year-old. The revenge fantasy of the third quotation is marked by its viciousness. But they share a vital quality: they are all riddled with emotive language.

Emotive language, as its name strongly suggests, is used to create an emotional response in the reader or listener. And that emotional response is often visceral, which literally means taking place in the gut. Fear, love, humor, horror all have physical manifestations: sweat, increased heart rate, laughter. Even my usual response to Trump’s language, nausea, is merely the physical manifestation of my disgust.

You might notice that in the midst of all this emotion, there is very little intellectual reaction going on. It takes real effort to think after reading a Trumpism, because you feel emotionally drained. A b.f. philosopher, on the other hand, leaves you exhausted because she exercised your brain. By purposely creating an emotional reaction, Trump is using linguistic prestidigitation to distract the reader from the critical task at hand of evaluating the legitimacy of his “alt-truth.” Far from seeking his own subjective truth, he is preventing the reader from engaging with the meaning of his words in any substantive way.

And that, dear reader, is why I feel utterly comfortable with labeling Trump as a b.s. artist, and his “alternate truths” as lies.

[2] And in case you think I’m being ever so slightly hysterical, you might want to check out this book.

[3] I am, of course, referring to the Atticus Finch of To Kill A Mockingbird, or, as I like to call him, the real Atticus Finch. Someday I will write a blog about the immorality of tricking an old lady with dementia into publishing a draft of a crap novel she had abandoned decades ago. But more of that anon.

[5] If you want to know the difference, I suggest you click here to read a really, really AMAZING blog that uses the best words to explain it!! Nice!

[6] Yes, yes, yes. I know that there are a few among you who have, indeed, read these works in their entirety and really, really liked them. Bully for you. But I was talking about normal people.

Copyright 2017 D. R. Miller

]]>deborah1960Why we need mourning bandshttps://essayettes.wordpress.com/2017/04/13/why-we-need-mourning-bands/
https://essayettes.wordpress.com/2017/04/13/why-we-need-mourning-bands/#commentsThu, 13 Apr 2017 15:41:29 +0000http://essayettes.wordpress.com/?p=204]]>I first ran across a mourning band back in my teens, when watching a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery on PBS (I was a very strange teenager). The band in question was worn by Detective Charles Parker, Wimsey’s sidekick, brother-in-law, and confidant. I don’t recall which mystery it was, or for whom Parker was in mourning, but I was very struck by the idea of the band itself. It was a simple piece of black cloth, neatly worn around Parker’s well-muscled arm. The effect it had on the other characters was amazing: open hostility would spontaneously morph into quiet deference, as the band silently, but clearly, announced that this was a man who has sustained a loss. Be gentle with him.

What a quaint custom, I thought. I wonder why we don’t wear them now

And I never thought about them again, until last week.

If you happened to have been in my local Home Goods store last week, you might have been startled by the bewildering sight of an otherwise sane-looking middle-aged woman crying silently, but openly, while holding a turquoise colored ice bucket to her chest. That would have been me.

Certainly, there were several people out there who did see me—I could tell that they had noticed me by how wide a berth they gave me (and believe me, given the crowded conditions of your typical Home Goods store, it involved some pretty tricky maneuvering to give me even a narrow berth). I certainly don’t begrudge them their wariness. Indeed, if the roles had been reversed, I would doubtlessly have sent my cart careening down the aisles in my rush to avoid contact with such a sight. After all, in these perilous times, who knows what insane thoughts and dark desires could have triggered those tears?

As it happens, I do know what had caused my tears upon beholding the ice bucket: it was the recent death of my eldest sister. My sister, you see, had pancreatic cancer, which, after a string of disastrous misadventures too gloomy to enumerate, resulted in her being able to ingest only liquids and ice chips. She especially liked chewing the ice, because it allowed her to pretend to be eating something. Consequently, we had to make sure that she had a steady supply of ice. Now, my sister could hardly be unique in this regard: after all, a hospice is generally chockerblock with the dying, and surely a fair proportion of them would be unable to eat anything but ice chips. So you would think they would supply you with a halfway decent ice bucket, wouldn’t you? However, the hospice had only those flimsy Styrofoam ice buckets/pitchers, the kind that seem to specialize in turning ice chips into ice slush.

So, when I saw that sassy little ice bucket, with its efficient insulation and darling little rope handles, I immediately thought of my sister, whose favorite color, as it happens, was turquoise. Cue water works, because her death is so recent, and my heart so raw, that any reminder of her is likely to get me going.

Having put the string of events into words, it is quite apparent that the connection between the ice bucket and her death is so tenuous that it is hard to say with a straight face that there is a connection at all. Indeed, to a rational mind, the existence of a turquoise ice bucket would hardly rise to the stature of a mere coincidence. But that’s grief for you: crazy, fitful, and prone to mischief. That’s precisely why a mourning band would be so handy: it would tell the world, “Watch out! Grieving sister ahead! Be careful: she might do something in-saaaane!” And the world, in turn, would gently nod its head and allow me to cry in the middle of the party section of my sister’s favorite store without feeling too embarrassed about it.

Mourning bands were first introduced to the male mourner’s wardrobe in the 1770’s, but they really hit their heyday in the Victorian era. When Prince Albert died, Queen Victoria ordered her male servants to wear their mourning bands for eight years! Now you generally see them on police badges when an officer dies in the line of duty, but even then, they are so small (they’re generally worn on the badge) and on for so short a time (usually from the date of death to the funeral), that they are hardly noticeable at all.[1] Given how prevalent death was in the Victorian era, with little kids, pregnant women, and consumptive factory workers kicking the bucket all around you, you would think that people would try to escape it. But no! Instead of avoiding death, Victorians positively wallowed in complex and restrictive funerary practices. But that is the paradox identified eons ago by Elisabeth Kübler Ross in On Death and Dying: when death was prevalent, we incorporated dying into our daily life. Now, when death is conveniently boxed away in a hospital, we keep it at arm’s length. Or else, in the event of spectacular deaths like the victims of mass shootings or marathon bombers, death becomes a media event, something that happens to other people, and thus remains beyond our personal experience. But that’s crazy, really—we’re all going to die. We are all born, and we all die. That’s life. Get used to it. Yet we rarely do get used to it, and we rarely treat death as the inevitability that it is.

In this, as in so many other things, my sister was an exception. She had been a nurse, and therefore had both the experience and the analytical mind necessary to meet death head-on, in a totally matter-of-fact manner. Thus it was that I actually read out loud the obituary I had written for her in order to obtain her editorial approval—the fourth most surreal incident of my life. I suspect that if my sister had seen a sobbing woman in the middle of Home Goods, she would have guessed that the woman had lost someone dear to her. I don’t know exactly what it is she would have done, but it would have been done with the knowledge that here was a person who needed special consideration.

Most people do not have my sister’s preternatural powers of observation, which is why a mourning band would be handy. Even though it started out as a mourning accessory for men, there is no reason why it couldn’t be used universally. It would give the mourner space to grieve, to cry for no apparent reason, and it would also allow the on-looker to back away discreetly. Or even to pat a stranger’s shoulder, in recognition that we are all at death’s mercy.

[1]Different cultures do still have mourning practices. For example, Jewish men don’t shave their beard for thirty days after the death of a loved one. But, frankly, that wouldn’t do too much for me, as I don’t generally shave my beard anyway. No one would notice. Also, the mourning band has the advantage of being universal: anyone can use it, even a grieving atheist such as myself. It is merely a simple banner stating that the wearer is grieving, with no religious or gender-specific overtones (or undertones, for that matter).

Copyright 2017 D.R. Miller

]]>https://essayettes.wordpress.com/2017/04/13/why-we-need-mourning-bands/feed/3FDR death of mother Saradeborah1960Ban Banners and the Banning Bannons That Support Them!https://essayettes.wordpress.com/2017/01/29/ban-banners-and-the-banning-bannons-that-support-them/
Sun, 29 Jan 2017 16:10:34 +0000http://essayettes.wordpress.com/?p=198]]>I started out this blog as a way to share breezy little essays about things of interest to me: The Archers, the wonders of Britain, Steinbeck’s superb use of structure to convey meaning, and even how not to raise your kids. Lately, I’ve been applying the principles that I taught to my erstwhile Critical Thinking classes to the various idiocies spouted off by the current regime, mostly because I find its total disregard of logic and intellectual honesty to be beyond outrageous. The voice I’ve been adopting in these latter essayettes has been pedantic sarcasm on steroids—as if I have been channeling a rabid Mr. Peabody—all in defense of sound reasoning and honest argumentation.

However, today I find that neither voice suffices to address today’s topic. Trump’s Executive Order on “Protection of the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”[1] is so grossly wrong on so many levels, that the only justifiable response to it is a fierce moral outrage. The New York Times provides a nice synopsis of the order:

Frankly, documenting all of the many ways that Trump has offended even the most lax standards of decency is too heavy a load for this little bagatelle of a blog to carry. But let me run down a few.

First, the class of people targeted by Trump’s pernicious decree are amongst the most miserable of the miserable. A refugee does not choose to leave his or her home country: under Department of Homeland Security (presumably those who would know best who constitutes a threat to the nation), a refugee is “a person who has fled his or her country of origin because of past persecution or a fear of future persecution based upon race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group (https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees-asylum/refugees/questions-answers-refugees ).” I think that the operative word to focus on here is “fled,” the past tense of “flee,” the first definition of which, appropriately enough for the purpose of this particular essayette, is “1. a : to run away, often from danger or evil : fly<The family fled from the war-torn zone.>b : to hurry toward a place of security <Refugees fled to a neighboring country.> (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flee).”[2] There is nothing voluntary about becoming a refugee. Indeed, the DHS regulations explicitly exclude those who have chosen to leave for economic or other reasons. It is compulsion, not desire, that induces the refugee to leave her native land. Targeting this vulnerable group of people, people who have had to leave behind all they knew and loved, is a despicable act of bullying—even coming from one of history’s all-time great despicable bullies. The fact that he chose to sign the order on Holocaust Remembrance Day is further proof (if any were needed) of Trump’s utter callousness to the suffering of others.

Second, Trump’s stated desire of ensuring “extreme vetting” of refugees in order to “protect the nation” is a straw man made of the shoddiest of materials. Refugees already undergo “extreme vetting”: the State Department undertakes an exhaustive review of each applicant’s claim for refugee status.[3] Typically, the process takes 18 to 24 months to complete,[4] hardly what you could sensibly call a lighthearted decision. How could this vetting possibly be more microscopic? What he calls “extreme vetting” is actually “exclusion.”

Further, Trump is creating a false equivalency between refugees and foreign terrorists. He asserts that refugees are somehow a threat to the country: if we take pity on the miserable, they will inevitably turn around and attack us. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, according to Trump, it is to have an ungrateful refugee. Yet there is little to back up Trump’s bald assertion. A recent study strongly suggests that in Germany, which has welcomed over a million refugees from the Maghreb, there is “no clear link between refugees and most kinds of crime (http://www.dw.com/en/study-contradicts-efforts-to-link-migrants-to-crime/a-19390414 ).” Indeed, increased numbers in immigration are correlated to decreases in crime overall, not only in Germany (ibid), but even here in the good old U S of A (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0002716212438938).[5] If immigration in general is beneficial to the host nation, how much more so is welcoming refugees, the people who have the greatest motivation to be grateful to their port in the storm?

Additionally, Trump’s particular definition of “foreign terrorist” is so narrowly drawn that it is nothing more than a coded word for “Muslim.” This is made absolutely clear by the fact that exceptions will be considered for members of “religious minorities”—or, as they are commonly referred to, Christians.[6] Trump’s fear, hatred, and fundamental misunderstanding of Islam is well-documented: it is amongst the highest pitched of his many dog whistles.[7] He is blatantly and deliberately targeting members of a particular religion. Perhaps Trump has suffered from a spectacular case of amnesia, because he certainly seems to have forgotten that, just a little over a week before he signed this evil document, he took a pledge to “uphold and defend the Constitution”—including, presumably, the First[8] and the Fourteenth[9] Amendments.

But, purely for the sake of argument, let’s forget all the moral, logical, and constitutional objections that I have raised to the Executive Order. Let’s even forget the possibility that other countries might start taking a long, hard look at US citizens entering their country. Instead, let’s look at the Order’s stated purpose: the protection of the nation. If that were truly Trump’s aim, then it is hard to see how he could have missed the mark by any wider margin. First, one would expect that at least one of the seven countries named in the order to have had citizens involved in terrorist attacks against the United States. However, such is not the case.[10] Not only that, but the refugees who are fleeing those countries are, in fact, the victims of the very violence that Trump is purportedly seeking to curb.[11] In fact, many of the Iraqi refugees now banned from entering the U.S. have been targeted for retribution by ISIS because they aided the U.S. military.[12] How does forsaking the people who aided us in any way make us safer? And what motivation will they have to help us in the future? What position does Trump’s actions put American military and civilian personnel currently in Iraq? The illogic of Trump’s position is more than mind-boggling: it is soul destroying.

And finally, the greatest danger to the nation is the fact that this Order, based as it is in venality, bigotry, and idiocy, is a 24 karat gift to ISIS or any of its ilk. It is not generosity that inspires terrorism. To the contrary, it is the clear injustice of this document that will serve as a clarion call to would-be martyrs, threatening US citizens not only here, but abroad. By acting so foolishly in order to “protect” us, all Trump has done is to place us in even greater danger.

[3] Q. What Kind Of Processing Can I Expect Under The United States Refugee Program?
A. The U.S. Department of State Resettlement Service Centers (RSCs) carry out most of the casework preparation for refugee eligibility interviews. The RSCs pre-screen applicants, help prepare the applications for USCIS, initiate background security checks, and arrange medical examinations for those refugees approved by USCIS.

Following USCIS approval, the processing entity also asks for the names and addresses of any relatives in the United States, for details on the person’s work history and job skills, and for any special educational or medical needs of the refugee and accompanying family members, in order to determine the best resettlement arrangements for the refugee.

[8] “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances (https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript).”

[9] “Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws (https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv ).”

]]>deborah1960Jason and the Argue-Notshttps://essayettes.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/jason-and-the-argue-nots/
Wed, 25 Jan 2017 03:33:08 +0000http://essayettes.wordpress.com/?p=184]]>Decisions, decisions. Goodness knows how difficult it can be to make a decision—especially when the choices are set out like so many juicy cherries, their taut skin barely able to contain all of the delicious fallacies percolating beneath the surface. But, really, some of these blogs have just been too long, so it is necessary to exercise discipline. This is especially urgent when considering the wit and wisdom of one of the nation’s premier fallacy factories, the Honorable Jason Chaffetz. In case you are not familiar with Representative Chaffetz, all you really need to know for the purposes of this lesson are the following three facts:

He has represented Utah’s third Congressional District since 2008;

He is the chair of the of the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform; and

Now, you might be wondering, after providing the platform for a witch hunt that arguably ultimately resulted in the non-election of perhaps the most qualified presidential candidate who ever walked the face of God’s green earth, however will Jason Chaffetz fill his newly cleared calendar? Well, there are many options out there, but I’ll tell you one thing that Chaffetz won’t be doing any time soon.

He won’t be investigating any of Trump’s possible problems with the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.[2]

Nope. Not a one.

Why ever not? I hear you cry. After all, isn’t the government oversight committee supposed to, well, oversee the government? And if the president is riddled with more potential conflicts of interests than a wharf rat has fleas, shouldn’t someone at least take a sneaky peek at what’s going on?

Well, apparently not. And why not? Well, on the 15th of January, Chaffetz explained his “reasoning” on This Week:

You see my dilemma, don’t you? I mean, here I have some of the most flagrant hypocrisy uttered in political discourse in the past week,[3] but at the same time, I also have a lovely example of a strawman. What’s a Critical Thinking Teacher to do?

Well, after weeping a bit at the thought of leaving that filet mignon of hypocrisy alone, I decided to go along with the straw man fallacy. Hypocrisy is just too easy, and there are far too many examples (and far too little time) for us to examine every example that comes our way, no matter how glorious it might be.[4] Straw man fallacies are a bit harder to understand, and since Chaffetz has given us a nice example to work with, it seems a bit churlish to let it go by unnoticed. So, let’s start, shall we?

First of all, what is a straw man fallacy? Well, I think that the good folks at nizkor.org do an excellent job of defining a straw man fallacy:

When I think of a straw man, I think of those World War I movies, where dashing young soldiers practice their bayonet skills by shoving the blade into bales of hay. It makes the whole idea of killing someone with a knife on a stick look wondrously simple. But when you get onto the battlefield, and you have to shove that sucker through bone and sinew, then you realize how false the straw man is. In an argument, when an opponent’s actual claim is thick with muscle, and one’s pitiful little bayonet of a refutation is too weak to penetrate it, it is very tempting to replace the target claim with a distantly related, but quite pathetic, pile of straw. You can then jab your rhetorical bayonet in it to your heart’s content, until all you’re left with is a pile of chaff.[5] Here’s an example:

A: We need to control the feral cat population in our neighborhood. This place is crawling with scrawny, scabby kittens.

B: You beast! You hate cats!

The straw man is B’s assertion that A hates cats. While it is possible that A does hate cats, there is insufficient evidence to support B’s assertion at this time. Instead, B has mischaracterized A’s desire to control feral cats as a desire to exterminate them. But the one does not equate to the other: there are a variety of means at hand to control feral cats that fall far short of introducing them en masse to their maker. However, the emotional appeal of the straw man is such that poor A is left to splutter out that he loves cats, wouldn’t dream of killing them, etc., etc., etc.—and in the meantime, no agreement is reached about what to do with the feline nurseries that have magically appeared throughout A’s once desirable neighborhood. And an effective straw man diverts all attention from the issue at hand—the hallmark of a logical fallacy.

So, there are a few straw men lurking around in Jason’s speechlet, but, for the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on only one. And here it is:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Five days from now, [Trump] will be the president of the United States. At that point, will you be requesting this information [about possible Emoluments Clause violations].

CHAFFETZ: No, not necessarily. Look, I’m not just going to go on these fishing expeditions. I didn’t do that with President Obama. We didn’t go through this with President Obama.

Now, it seems reasonable at first blush, doesn’t it? We didn’t go after President Obama, so why should we go after President Trump? Well, sure, except for one little thing: You didn’t go after President Obama because President Obama didn’t have any Emoluments clause issues, numb nuts!

So, now that you’re armed with this knowledge, what should you do? Well, straw men are tricky, because in the heat of the moment it’s easy to be thrown off course by the emotions that the straw man stirs up. You need to be able to respond quickly and coolly to the diversionary tactic. That’s the nature of reasoned debate: it requires a certain amount of cold-bloodedness in order to maintain logic. But you don’t want to alienate your audience by being a Spock-like slave to your rational side. Clothe your muscular and robust logical refutation with humor, for instance: “Is that a straw man in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” Or, right before eviscerating the idiocy that your counterpart has just uttered, openly acknowledge its emotional appeal: “Gosh, Mary, you sure know how to stir up a hornet’s nest with that last irrelevant remark!” Do what you must, but just do it, because now, more than ever, we are confronted by an army of straw men.

Now that you’re done with this article, it would be good practice to spot and analyze the other straw men in Chaffetz’s statement. I’ll give you a hint, too: just about every sentence Jase utters is home to a straw man.

[2] “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” (US Const. Article I, sec. 9, clause 8).

[4] But before continuing on, let’s just agree that Jason Chaffetz must have a huge and brassy pair on him if he’s saying that he would never go on a fishing hunt! As if. Whew! Well, that feels better.

No matter how you look at it, you just know that it’s a matter of linguistic destiny that Rep. Chaffetz is guilty of using this particular fallacy.

]]>deborah1960Ignoramus Rexhttps://essayettes.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/ignoramus-rex/
Sun, 15 Jan 2017 05:28:19 +0000http://essayettes.wordpress.com/?p=168]]>I was waiting in line at my local hardware store, chatting with my friend about the jolly japes I would have as I made my voice heard during the upcoming post-inauguration marches, when a boorish bellow invaded my pink and shell-like ear:

“Oh, why don’t you libtards get over yourselves? Trump won the election, so sit down and shut up.”

Naturally, I whipped around and, before he could chortle too heartily at his witty bon mot, impaled him with my gimlet eye.

“You do realize that you have just committed an ignoratio elenchi fallacy, don’t you?”

“Huh?” was his penetrating response.

“An ignoratio elenchi fallacy. Or ‘ignorance of refutation.’ Derived from the apparent fact that you don’t quite understand what a refutation is. A refutation of a claim needs to be relevant to the claim being made. So, when you rudely interjected your unsolicited irrelevant remark into my private conversation, you’ve committed the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi.”

“Yeah,” said the nice young man who had helped me decide which brand of indelible magic markers I would use to write my protest signs. “The Critical Thinking Teacher was talking about the joys of exercising one’s First Amendments rights, and you barged in, saying that Trump won the election. As if that had anything to do with the price of beans in Boston.”

“That’s right,” my friend piped up. “The mere fact that Trump somehow managed to scrape together a sufficient number of Electoral College votes has absolutely no logical relationship to my friend’s observation that it would be jolly spiffing to remind the world that the majority of Americans reject his vicious agenda. You are raising an entirely different and unconnected issue.”

“But, but, isn’t that a red herring? Aren’t they the same thing?” Irksome Inter-meddler spluttered in dismay.

“Of course a red herring isn’t the same as ignoratio elenchi, you dolt.” An awed hush fell upon us. It was Ben, the store cat, known throughout the neighborhood for his disdain of poorly reasoned argument. “While they both have the effect of distracting the listener from the matter at hand, the red herring requires an intent to distract. Ignoratio elenchi, however, is usually the result of mindless blurting. Judging from your gormless expression, anyone with half an ounce of brain matter would easily discern that you are no more capable of forming an intent than I am capable of caring what you think.”

With that, Ben turned his back to us, curled himself into a ginger ball of fluffy cuteness, and slept the dreamless slumber of the purely contemptuous.

By this time, the rude oaf was transformed into a smoldering pile of ash, leaving me to contemplate the awesome and beautiful power of communal critical thinking. Nice!

However, after paying for the Sharpies (and while the nice young man was literally consigning the Trump supporter to the dust bin of history), I was struck by the implications of what Ben had said. It had been quite a busy week for our Twitter-in-Chief-Elect. First, he responded to Meryl Streep’s eloquent call-out of his general nastiness by posting a generally nasty tweet in which he called Streep “over-rated” (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/818419002548568064). [1] Similarly, after Representative John Lewis[2] stated that he didn’t think Trump was a legitimate president,[3] Trump blasted out this charming riposte:

Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk – no action or results. Sad! (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/820255947956383744).[4]

Aside from the utterly fact-free nature of these tweets,[5] it’s clear that these attacks are not related to the matter at hand. Even if Streep were such a has-been that she would deign to appear on Celebrity Apprentice, it has nothing to do with the fact that Trump’s “attraction” has a great deal to do with his xenophobic, misogynist, racist, and just generally vile rhetoric. Similarly, attacking John Lewis’s record in no way addresses the legion of issues that would give any thinking person pause before accepting the legitimacy of Trump’s occupancy of the Oval Office. Clearly, both tweets were a distraction.[6]

But were they intended as distractions, or are they merely the incontinent expressions of a chronically unsound reasoner? I have in a previous blog characterized the Streep tweet as a red herring,[7] but I’m beginning to have my doubts. The sheer volume of his tweets makes me think that he might be sincere in his beliefs, and his inability to make a single relevant refutation to any claim makes him a veritable ignoratio elenchi factory. On the other hand, I find it somehow more reassuring to think that he’s being deliberate. That would, at the very least, indicate that some thought is going into his actions.[8] At this point, I am leaning both ways—mostly because I don’t want to make that cold and lonely voyage into Trump’s mind that would be necessary to come to a definitive conclusion. And at the end of the day, regardless of Ben the cat’s opinion, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we, as warriors in the Critical Thinking Army, must be ever on the lookout for the irrelevant refutation—whether intended or not—and, when we find it, guide our readers and listeners to the real issue that it seeks to obscure.

[4] The dreadful irony of lashing out at John Lewis on the Saturday before Martin Luther King’s birthday holiday is apparently lost on Trump. Similarly, it’s fun to note that Lewis has accomplished more for humanity with his “talk, talk, talk” than all of Trump’s actions ever would, even if you lumped them all together in one unattractive heap.

[6] There were, of course, many, many other irrelevancies in this week’s outpourings from Trump’s twitter account, but I’ve been advised by my editorial board to keep these blogs short and sweet. But if you want a handy-dandy compilation of Trump’s oeuvre, then you really gotta check out The Atlantic’s “Trump Tweet Tracker” (https://www.theatlantic.com/liveblogs/2016/12/donald-trump-twitter/511619/). It’s a hoot.

[8] I have no problem with maintaining that Kellyanne is deliberately using red herrings. As a professional flunky, she would be expected to have the skillset necessary to deliberately throw sand in her opponents’ eyes.

Copyright 2017 D R Miller

]]>deborah1960Feast of the the Assumptionshttps://essayettes.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/feast-of-the-the-assumptions/
Fri, 13 Jan 2017 03:48:47 +0000http://essayettes.wordpress.com/?p=144]]>Happily for teachers of Critical Thinking, as the Trump Administration carries on with its carrying-on, there will doubtless be a veritable wealth of flawed logic arising from the actual words and phrases stoking the engines of its, uh, progress that we can use to generate powerful resources to illustrate the principles of logical thinking to our students. Oh, happy day! Who says you can’t teach by negative example? [1] So, up until now, I’ve been using critical thinking techniques to evaluate the rhetoric, both oral and written, of Donald Trump and his surrogates. To that end, I have focused on the actual words that are being used in order to examine the validity (or otherwise) of the statements that are being made, primarily by analyzing how the authors committed one form of logical fallacy or another, or else relied upon a somewhat less than reliable source. However, in this essay, I want to focus upon what is being left unsaid: the non-spoken assumptions that the speaker or writer relies upon in order to support what is explicitly being stated.

Now, I am as familiar as the rest of you with that old saw, “When you assume something, you make an ass out of u and me.” Quite droll, indeed. The truth of the matter is, however, that we make assumptions just about every waking hour. An assumption is an unstated, unexamined belief that underlies our thinking. When I tuck myself into bed each night, I assume that I will wake up the next morning. When Meryl Streep is in a movie, I assume that she will give an amazing and not-at-all overrated performance. When I see Kellyanne Conway on the TV, I assume that my blood pressure will skyrocket. And so it goes.

As it is in life, so it is in argumentation. You might recall that an argument is the happy marriage of a debatable claim and a reason supporting it. The degree to which you support your reasons lends strength to the argument, but explanations are not a necessary component of the argument itself. However, just about every argument requires the listener to make at least one assumption in order to make the link between the claim and the reason supporting it.[2] Let’s look at the following argument to see exactly what I mean:

Because of its overwhelming role in eradicating disease, I conclude that water sanitation is the greatest invention.

Now, I could strengthen this argument by adding statistics about water borne illnesses, or information about how washing hands in clean water can inhibit the spread of contagion, but even without these flourishes, I still have an argument. However, in order for the claim (“I conclude…”) to arise logically from the reason (“Because of its overwhelming role…”), I have to make a number of assumptions. For example, I am assuming that the eradication of disease is the greatest possible achievement. Upon its face, this looks like a reasonable assumption, but are there other, equally significant achievements? Indeed, aren’t there achievements, such as the eradication of adulthood illiteracy, that actually made the development of sanitation systems possible? Similarly, there is an assumption that the greatest invention is the one that has the greatest beneficial impact. Many might agree with this position, but upon closer examination, one can see that this assumption might be disputed: “great” might mean “having the greatest impact,” regardless whether that impact is beneficial or harmful. Thus, the greatest invention might be the combustion engine, which has had not only an enormous impact on human mobility, but has also powered an unprecedented industrial revolution that is still ongoing after two centuries and (without any room for authentic debate whatsoever) caused global warming. And then there is the assumption that is absolutely critical for the argument to hold any water whatsoever: that it is actually possible to take all the inventions made by humanity and quantify which, of all them, is the greatest. I bet you didn’t even think of that one, did you? And yet, it is the invisible pole that is holding up the great debate tent. Or something like that. At any rate, this last example should illustrate not only how important assumptions are to a debate but also how hard they can be to discern. Sometimes, an assumption is so basic to an argument that it becomes nearly invisible.

Therefore, even though they are unstated, assumptions are a critical aspect of any argument. You might wonder why, if they’re so damned important, they aren’t explicitly stated. That seems reasonable, and good writers will frequently spell out the less obvious assumptions that they rely upon as they make their points. But if a writer spells out every assumption that she is relying upon, then she will never reach the end of the argument. But that doesn’t absolve the careful reader (or listener) of the responsibility of examining the underlying assumptions of an argument. This attention to assumptions is critical, because if they are unsound, then, alas, the argument is unsound.

Yes, that’s right. Not only do you have to find the assumptions, but then you have to evaluate them. Nothing is ever handed to you on a silver platter in the world of reasoned debate.

I would say that most assumptions are fairly innocuous: they are grounded in experience, or else there is a strong link between the reason and the claim, so the “bridge” provided by the assumption is fairly short and strong. However, there are times when the connection between the two is not short: in cases such as these, it is helpful to the reader for the writer to lay these assumptions out explicitly. For example, at first glance, there appears to be no logical connection between the claim and reason in the following argument “I am moving to Kansas, therefore I need the name of a really good contractor.” That’s because the assumptions linking the two are not immediately apparent. But once those assumptions are stated, the link becomes clearer, and the conclusion isn’t as zany as it first appears: I am moving to Kansas. Based on what I know of the climate, I assume that I have a good chance of weathering a tornado or two. Also, I assume that the best way to survive a tornado is to have a solidly built storm cellar that I can escape to when I hear those sirens wailing. I further assume that the best storm cellars are built by really good contractors. Therefore, I need to get the name of a really good contractor.” See? Once the bridge is laid out, the nexus becomes clearer.

The other problem arises when the link between the reason and the conclusion is not strong for any number of reasons. For example, the assumption might fly in the face of facts. The following argument might have been made right up until the moment Senator Marco Rubio took the microphone during the Tillerson confirmation hearings:

Because Senator Marco Rubio, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is a Republican, he will give Rex Tillerson an easy time during the confirmation hearings.

Another reason that an assumption might be flawed could be that the speaker is assuming that the source of a claim is credible. Take this example, hot off the presses, where Trump is discrediting an unverified report that Putin is blackmailing him:

Finally, an assumption might be incorrect because it is based on a logical fallacy. Naturally, this is the most difficult type of false assumption to figure out, because not only do you have to articulate an assumption, but you also need to see if it fits into one of the many, many kinds of flaws in logic that exist. But while it is hard, it is not impossible—and it is critical. Practice will make the task easier, so here’s an easily spotted logically flawed assumption to start out with, and then we’ll examine a slightly more difficult example, okay?

Remember, way back when we still had sensibilities to be offended, the lovely things that Donald said about our neighbors South of the Border when he announced his candidacy? No? There’s just been too much stuff to pull that particular rabbit out of your hat? Okay. Here’s a reminder:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people (http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/).[5]

There are some interesting assumptions going on here. For example, when he says, “They’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you,” the assumption he’s making is that his supporters (the ones to whom he is directing his remarks) are the best. However, that is not the example of a logically fallacious assumption that we’re examining. It’s just factually wrong. The logically flawed assumption is the one that he makes at the end, when he says “And some, I assume, are good people.” This explicit assumption depends upon an underlying implicit assumption: “I also assume that the rest of the Mexicans, the so-much-greater-number-than-‘some’, are bad people.” This assumption has many of the hallmarks of a hasty generalization.

A hasty generalization, as its name implies, is a broad categorization that is made unwisely because there are insufficient examples to support it. In other words, the speaker didn’t wait for all the data to come in. So, for example, I see swan A, and it is white. So too are Swans B and C. The rather hasty generalization that I conclude from this observation is that all swans are white. And just as soon as a black swan paddles down the stream, I will learn that my conclusion is quite wrong. Just too damned hasty.

This is what Donald has done. Based on some scanty data, he has established that damned near all Mexicans are bad, bad people. He offers neither evidence nor statistics; hell, he doesn’t even give anecdotal evidence (“I knew this Mexican, and he was a gun runner. Therefore, all Mexicans are gun runners”). In fact, there is so little support for his assumption that it hardly rises to the dignity of a hasty generalization: no data, just nastiness. It is much, much more flawed than my example. At least I saw those three swans. But that’s our Donald. Full of surprises.

So, that was the example of a logically flawed assumption that is fairly easy to identify. Before looking at the next flawed assumption, it’s worthwhile to discuss “conflation.” Conflation occurs when the speaker asserts an identity between two things (people, ideas, actions, etc.) that are actually distinct and separate from each other. Conflation causes confusion, because clear lines are blurred, and the listener is frequently left scratching his head. The reason why this is a bit harder to spot than, say, a hasty generalization, is that you have to stop and ask yourself whether the two things are separate or identical. Is “might” truly “right”? Or is there a difference?

On 11 January 2017, during his first press conference since the election, Trump was confronted with many, many questions about his budding relationship with Vladimir Putin. And he responded with what can only be described as a master class in conflation. Not only did he equate Buzzfeed’s decision to print the entire unverified dossier about what Vlad knows about Donald with CNN’s decision to report about the two page summary of the allegations shared with Trump, but he also equated the situation with Nazi Germany (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/trump-press-conference-transcript.html ). But as fascinating as these examples are, they are not the instance of conflation that I find particularly worthy of close analysis.

In response to the suggestion that there might be something, uh, unwholesome about this friendship, Trump responded with the following:

If Putin likes Trump, guess what, folks, that’s an asset.

Now, strange as this might seem, the unspoken assumption that I wish to explore is not “Trump honestly thinks he can play with fire without getting burned.” Nope. The assumption that I wish to explore is “Putin’s warm feelings for Trump equates to good news for America.”[6] An ancillary to this assumption might very well be “If it’s good for Trump, then it’s good for America.”

So, it’s obvious that we need to listen carefully to what is not being said as carefully as we listen to what is actually said. When our Dear Leader’s favorite form of communication with his subjects fellow citizens is a social media app that permits him to use only 140 characters to express his views on complex subjects, he will of necessity leave gloss over a few important details. Anyone would have to omit words—even if one weren’t a lazy thinker—and as a result, there is no real opportunity to tease out subtleties or to explain assumptions. Using Twitter to react coherently to the world’s problems would be a challenge for a nuanced thinker, such as President Obama.[8] It is especially problematic, therefore, when one tweets in the cold hours of the far too early morning, in visceral reaction to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

[1] As for the rest of you, well, I’m sure that everything will be fine. Just fine. Really.

[2] Under Toulmin’s model of arguments, the term “warrant” is used to refer to these underlying assumptions (although heaven only knows why he chose to call them that—he could just as easily have called them “goulash,” as far as I’m concerned) http://changingminds.org/disciplines/argument/making_argument/toulmin.htm. Warrants can be either implicitly understood or explicitly laid out; for the purpose of this blog, I am focusing on the implicitly understood assumptions (or warrants or goulash) that bridge the gap between the reason and the conclusion.

[6] This observation is based on the somewhat generous assumption that, as the President Elect of these United States, he is referring to Putin’s gushy feelings as an asset to the country. Of course, this assumption could be totally wrong, and Trump could be baldly asserting that his special relationship with Vlad is a personal asset, and fuck the rest of the country. Perish the thought.

A “red herring” in rhetoric refers to a diversionary tactic that is used to distract attention from the issue actually at hand. Because it is an attempt to use an irrelevancy to avoid the real argument, it is a massive, albeit popular, logical fallacy. There are lots of fun, apocryphal stories about the origin of the phrase, but they all boil down to the same idea: in order to throw hounds off a trail, crafty [fugitives, thieves, hunters, take your pick] would use a stinky old fish to create a false trail for whatever gullible rube they were trying to fool (http://www.culinarylore.com/food-history:origin-of-red-herring-expression, http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2016/05/origins-phrase-red-herring/). I was reminded of the term on December 29, when various Trump surrogates, including Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer, strongly implied that the real story about the alleged Russian hacks of the DNC computers was how the DNC was actually to blame because of its piss-poor cybersecurity measures.

CNN asked Kellyanne about actions President Obama took in response to intelligence reports that not only did Russia hack the DNC, but they did so in aid of the Trump campaign. She said many interesting things that day, but this is what really pricked up my ears:

It seemed as if she were saying that, instead of going after the hackers and whoever might have benefitted from their actions, we should instead blame the DNC. Now that seems like a distraction, doesn’t it?

But it is important not to leap to conclusions. Even teachers of Critical Thinking have been known to have an emotional reaction or two, and I certainly did not want to commit a logical fallacy of my own. In this case, the fallacy I wanted to avoid is called “confusing an explanation for an excuse.”

Before going on to examine this fallacy, it’s important to recall basic principles of argumentation in order to understand the difference between excuses and explanations. An argument has two basic components: a reason and a conclusion. A conclusion is the proposition or claim that you are trying to prove. A reason is a statement given to support or justify the conclusion. If you can logically put “because” before a statement, it is a reason; similarly, if you can put “therefore” before a statement, then it is a conclusion. [1] And if you have the two together, then you have an argument.

Here are some examples:

“[Because] I think, therefore I am.”

“[Because] I am a grammar nazi. Therefore I would be a good copy editor.”

“[Because] I like cats, therefore I hate dogs.”

These are all properly formulated (albeit not very well-developed) arguments.

Explanations, however, are not reasons—they support the reason by making the thinking behind the reason clearer.

“I like cats. They are fluffy and sweet. Therefore, I hate dogs.”

The statement “they are fluffy and sweet” clarifies why I prefer cats, but does not justify why I hate dogs. Thus, it is an explanation, and not a reason.

Unlike most logical fallacies, where the flaw is committed by the speaker or writer, “confusing an explanation for an excuse” is usually the result of faulty thinking on the part of the reader or listener. Instead of realizing that what is being said is being offered to clarify the reasons behind the speaker’s ultimate conclusion, the reader jumps ahead and assumes that the writer is justifying the conclusion. In other words, what is being used as an explanation is interpreted as a reason or excuse.

Here’s an example of how the fallacy can be committed:

Me: Where’s your homework?

Student: I didn’t do it. I am a lazy slug.

Me: I suppose you think that excuses/justifies your decision not to hand in your homework. [SPOILER ALERT: This is the step where I commit the fallacy.]

Student: No, I’m just explaining/clarifying that this is how God made me. You knew this about me, you have always known this about me, and you will always know this about me. Therefore, it was totally illogical of you to expect me to do the homework in the first place

I assumed that the student was saying “Because I am a lazy slug, I therefore did not do the homework,” and attacked her before she could conclude the argument. I (gasp!) committed a flaw in my logic because I interrupted her before she could give me her reason (“You knew this about me…”) that supported her conclusion (“Therefore, it was totally illogical of you to expect me to do the homework in the first place”). “I am a lazy slug” was simply strengthening her reason. Now, I don’t have to accept her argument, but at least I can recognize the true role being performed by her statement, “I am a lazy slug.”

It is not always easy to make the distinction between an explanation and an excuse. For example, sometimes an explanation is so compelling that it looks like an excuse.

Me: Where’s your homework?

Student: I was in the hospital for two weeks in traction for two broken arms and high as a kite on pain killers.

Now, unless I were a total dickhead, this explanation would more than suffice as justification for cutting the kid some slack. But, strictly speaking, it is still an explanation that supports the implied reason that she couldn’t do the homework, which would support her implied conclusion that she should be exempted from my “homework is due when homework is due” policy. If my student were as pedantic as I am, she would have formulated her argument thusly:

Me: Where’s your homework?

Student: I should be not be punished for not handing in my homework [Conclusion] because I couldn’t do it [Reason/excuse/justification]. I was in the hospital for two weeks in traction for two broken arms and high as a kite on pain killers [Explanation].

There are many reasons why the listener can mistake explanations for excuses. My second student didn’t structure her argument formally (she was still on painkillers), and it’s rather unreasonable (even for a dedicated pedant such as your author) to expect everyone to formulate every argument according to my exacting specifications. Another reason the listener can make the mistake is because of emotions. For example, I was so pissed off at the student in the first example that I jumped the gun.

In order to distinguish excuses from explanations, it is necessary to see how the statement in question is being used. Is it setting the stage by giving context for the reasons supporting the conclusion? Is it giving you a fact that strengthens the reasoning behind the conclusion? Or is it being used as a reason that justifies the conclusion of the argument?

So, keeping these considerations in mind, let’s look again at what Kellyanne said about the DNC hacks to determine if I’ve committed a fallacy by mistaking her explanation for her reason:

Now, if we were speaking strictly in structural terms, it’s clear that Kellyanne is making an argument: you can logically insert the word “because” in front of the sentence starting “They didn’t have the proper security…” and “therefore” in front of “This is really about the DNC’s breach.” Grrr. She really does seem to be saying that the DNC is solely responsible for the hack. But, maybe like my student in my second example, Kellyanne’s powers of reasoning were somehow not up to par. Maybe the stress of her job is getting to her. So let’s cut her some slack, and see if we can discern an implied intent to use this statement as an explanation, and not an excuse. To do this would require us to see if “This is really about the DNC’s breach” can function as a reason, and not a conclusion.

But, assuming Kellyanne is being logical, there should be some proposition that would flow naturally from her reason “This is really about the DNC’s breach.” What could that conclusion be? That the DNC is the author of their own downfall? That the hackers are utterly absolved of their own culpability? It’s hard to see what other conclusion might be drawn.[2]

Or, if there is no reason at all in her statement, but it is instead a pile of explanations, of clarifications, of context, what reason would those explanations support? Perhaps she is using this information to build an argument about the necessity for constant vigilance in the face of foreign attacks upon our political structures. In that case, we would reasonably look for her to condemn the Russians for taking advantage of the security breach. Such an argument might look like this:

This is really about the DNC’s breach. They didn’t have the proper security … and someone was able to hack the information, and we are not in favor of foreign governments interfering in our elections or interfering in our intelligence. Because of the lax security, the Russians were able to influence the outcome of the election. Therefore, we must have a root and branch investigation of the DNC hacking to ensure that this never happens again.[3]

However, Kellyanne’s statement does not use the fact of the DNC’s rather fey attitude to cybersecurity for either of these purposes. No. Instead, she says “[t]his is really about the DNC’s breach.” That’s it. End of report. Kellyanne is not showing any interest in addressing the underlying issue of the rights or wrongs of the DNC hack: instead, she is allocating all of the blame to the DNC, and none to the hackers. So, after all that, I’m pretty sure that I’m not committing the error of mistaking an explanation for a reason. Additionally, other GOP surrogates have failed to dissuade me from this conclusion.

For example, Sean Spicer used similar language the same day in his response to the news that the Russians were linked to the hacking:

Again, this might be deemed to be an explanation of why the hacking occurred in the first place. However, Sean never takes that extra step of saying that the hacks should never occurred in the first place, or that we really do need to find a way to keep those pesky Russians from stealing personal documents. Instead, he goes on to attack the media for not asking the DNC about its crap security and the intelligence agencies for not making their findings public. Indeed, his ire seems to be aimed at just about everybody except the people who experts agree are the most likely culprit. This is not the language of explanation: it’s the language of obfuscation. Of sand in your eyes. Or, to use a term I learned on my mother’s knees, horse feathers.

Well, what’s the big deal, you might ask. After all, Kellyanne and Sean have a point: if the DNC hadn’t been so whimsical about basic cybersecurity, they wouldn’t have been hacked, right? Even if they come to this conclusion, what makes it a red herring?

Well, the reason why it’s a red herring is that it is an attempt to distract the reader from the real issues at hand: who the hell committed those hacks, and what should we do about them and their beneficiaries? Instead, Kellyanne and Sean are offering up a new culprit: the victim of the hacks, and not the hackers themselves.

There is something that feels good about this stance: it seems balanced. The bad action provokes the bad reaction. Man up and stop being such a baby—you got what was coming to you. And there are, indeed, times when someone richly deserves the bad karma he or she provokes. I once knew a guy who wrecked his MG Spitfire, so his amazingly indulgent parents gave him a Triumph 7. Spoiled rich guy hated the Triumph, so he would leave it in the middle of the highest crime neighborhood in the city– unlocked, convertible roof opened, windows down, and key dangling from the ignition—praying that it would be stolen so his parents could use the insurance money to buy him a new Spitfire. Of course it wasn’t stolen (any would-be thief with half a brain cell would have thought it was a trap set by the police), but if it had been, I would have been the first in line to say that my friend had it coming to him.[4]

But it is precisely because this formulation is so emotionally satisfying that we should look at it carefully. Remember: emotions cloud reason. In essence, we are blaming the victim, and a victim, by definition, should evoke our sympathy. Therefore, when a claim not only neutralizes our compassion, but actually gets us to actively sneer at the victim, we really need to look at it with a magnifying glass.

The key to determining the reasonableness of blaming the victim is to examine the proportionality of the action and the result. The classic formulation of victim blaming is “if she weren’t so drunk/dressed like a slut/walking home alone, she would not have been raped.” Surely, even if any of these actions were the proximate cause of a sexual assault (and that is HIGHLY debatable), they are so negligible that they wouldn’t justify a brutal crime. The results are simply wildly out of proportion to the alleged cause.[5]

So, let us use the proportionality test to ascertain whether it is fair to say that, since the DNC is the author of its own woes, we should not try to dig more into the hacking itself.

Second, we need to look at the enormity of the Russian hack. Top intelligence officials believe that the Russians deliberately interfered with our election by selectively releasing embarrassing emails in the hopes of swaying the voters away from Secretary Clinton. Goodness only knows why they preferred Trump; I admit I’m as perplexed as the next person about it. Maybe it has something to do with those pesky tax forms (http://ijr.com/2016/09/698715-senate-democrats-speculate-that-donald-trumps-tax-returns-would-reveal-russian-collusion/), or the bizarre love triangle between Putin, Trump, and Manafort (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439164/donald-trump-paul-manafort-russian-ties) . But whatever the reason, there is a clear indication that this election’s results probably came from Russia, with love. This is a foreign attack on our electoral system, which, in the humble opinion of your author, is a YUGE deal. The preservation of fundamental democratic principles demands that the government conduct a full and open investigation into the hack and its connections to the RNC, even if the DNC were hopelessly naïve about cybersecurity.

Consequently, not only did Kellyanne and Sean use a red herring to keep us off the trail, but it was a particularly stinky one.

THIS JUST IN:

Even though Kellyanne and Sean made their comments on 29 December, I didn’t complete this essay until 1 AM on 4 January. That’s because I like to do a little something called “thinking” before I set my words down for everyone to read. Call me old school. However, it did give me a little qualm, thinking that what I said might not have the same relevance that it might have had if I had been a bit quicker at the keyboard.

Well, thank God for Donald Trump (and, trust me, that’s a prayer you’ll rarely hear from my lips)! Almost as if my fairy godmother had let him know my worries, he posted the following on Twitter at 7:22 AM on 4 January:

Clearly, Trump is using one of his favorite devices—the rhetorical question—to make the argument that the DNC’s ineptitude, and not the Russian cyber hit squad(s), are to blame for the hack. There is not even a hint of a whiff of an explanation here: the DNC was careless, therefore they are to blame. The use of the question is especially telling, because questions, by their nature, raise, well, questions. They do not provide facts. They do not provide answers. They demand responses. So it is evident that Trump is using the old red herring (as well as blaming the victim) to distract us from the substantive questions about Russia’s role in his election. Nice!

Furthermore, I can’t help but notice that Trump is using Assange as a source about both the DNC cybersecurity and the role of the Russians. Now, Assange might be a stand-up kind of guy. Haven’t a clue. However, when it comes to Secretary Clinton, he’s hardly a fan:

It kind of hurts to admit this, but I get the distinct impression that Trump has not read my earlier blog on how to evaluate sources.[6] If he had, he would know to be wary of citing Assange under these circumstances as he fails two of the prongs of the RAVEN test: V (vested interest) and N (neutrality). Assange clearly hates Clinton, so he is far from neutral. Further, while I’m sure that being squirreled away in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London is as much fun for him as it is for his hosts, I bet that Assange is hankering to breathe the sweet, sweet air of freedom. But if he hits the pavements, he might be sent to Sweden to face two rape charges.[7] Yet, that is not the least of his legal woes: once he’s in Sweden, he might very well be sent to the US and face capital charges for leaking a whole heap o’ classified documents.[8] So things might be a bit rosier for Assange if a non-Secretary Clinton were in the White House—especially if said non-Clinton owed his occupancy of the Oval Office to, in some degree, Assange. In other words, Assange has a vested interest in the outcome of this particular debate.

So, in conclusion, I needn’t have worried that Kellyanne’s little red herring would be irrelevant. It is as stinky now as it was when she rubbed it on CNN’s trail on the 29th. It also indicates that we can expect more, and not less, use of this logical fallacy on the part of the Trump administration. Sad!

[1] This is not to say that the reason is a good one, or that it necessarily leads to the conclusion. It’s just saying that this is how an argument is formally structured. The argument, “[Because] Fox News is owned by Rupert Murdoch, therefore I believe every word Tucker Carlson says,” while structurally correct, does not pass substantive muster in ways too numerous to address.

[2] And for reasons given below, I would count this conclusion as a red herring.

[3] Of course, another formulation of the argument might have the following reason and conclusion:

Because you guys were suckers, [therefore] we win. Nanny, nanny boo-boo.

But surely not.

[4] And, given the fact that the car wasn’t stolen, it is arguable that he got exactly what was coming to him.

[5] Unlike my rich friend, whose actions not only would have justified the theft of his car, but also the pressing of charges for insurance fraud.

[8] The United Kingdom does not extradite people if they are facing the death penalty after a court ruled that the risk of serving on death row would constitute a violation of article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which I think is rather sporting. Soering v United Kingdom (1989) 11 EHRR 439, Judgment of 7 July 1989. That’s why the trip to Stockholm is key to getting him to the US: Sweden apparently has no such qualms.

Copyright 2017 D R Miller

]]>deborah1960Ding, dong, Fallacies on High! The RNC’s been tweeting!https://essayettes.wordpress.com/2016/12/28/ding-dong-fallacies-on-high-the-rncs-been-tweeting/
Wed, 28 Dec 2016 16:34:27 +0000http://essayettes.wordpress.com/?p=114]]>My goodness, but Christmas just keeps on giving and giving! Not only did the RNC appear to greet the day with a false equivalency between Trump and Jesus, but Trump has provided another opportunity for me to discuss yet another type of logical fallacy: post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). Now, I was kind of hoping to take a bit of a break in my blogging because, as I’ve confessed before, I am quite lazy. Also, all the kids are home, and it would have been nice to spend a little more time with them. But, as my father told me once, you should spread when the manure is hot. Or something like that. But whatever he said, the message is clear: with material this good, it is a moral imperative to respond in a timely manner.

So, take my hand, and let’s commence our journey through the looking glass.

Ambiguous Ambiguities

Reince Priebus, Chair of the RNC, caused quite a kerfluffle with his Christmas Day greeting to the nation. I’m certain that Priebus had only the purest of intentions, but the internet has exploded over his innocent tweet. Half of the nation claimed Reince was favorably comparing Trump to the Prince of Peace, while the other half denied it, presumably because no one would be that vulgar. (http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/311799-social-media-erupts-after-gop-statement-about-new-king). It seems that no one knows precisely what Priebus meant, and this is a good clue that he has been ambiguous.

“Ambiguous” comes from hitching the prefix ambi- (both or around) to a form of the Latin verb agere (to lead or drive) (https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/ambiguous ). Thus, an ambiguous word or phrase has a meaning that can be driven in two opposing directions, or all around a variety of directions. They generally arise when an author uses a word with more than one meaning, but her grammar doesn’t make clear which meaning is used. For example, the mythical headline “Man Biting Dog” is humorous because it is unclear whether “man biting” constitutes the subject and verb of the sentence, or if it is a compound adjective describing the dog. This is called an amphiboly, if you really want to know.

Another kind of common ambiguity is “equivocation,” which occurs when the author uses a word in one way at the beginning of his premise, but then does the old switcheroo to another definition later on. For example, look at the following:

Some think that artifice is necessary to create a work of lasting value; therefore, lies, the most common form of artifice, are masterpieces.

Here, I’m starting out with the original meaning of the word “artifice”, clever or artful skill, but in the second clause, I use the other meaning of the word: trickery or connivance. I have equivocated.

The issue at hand is what Priebus meant by “a new King.” Some people are saying that Priebus is alluding to the election of Trump in his virtual Hallmark card. They get this outlandish notion by interpreting “new,” as in “new King,” to mean “fresh,” “different,” or “novel”—the same meaning that is apparently being used when Priebus refers to “a new hope” in the first part of the tweet (unless, of course, Priebus is a huge fan of Star Wars Episode IV, or, as I like to call it, The First Ever Star Wars Movie–RIP, General Organa). In other words, critics of Priebus are saying that he is not being ambiguous at all, and his meaning is clear. Now how crazy is that? And if they are right, that Priebus is unequivocally using the same definition of the word throughout the tweet, then Priebus is referring to a new ruler on the scene. If that new ruler happens to be Trump, then the tweet is doubly blasphemous. Trump is many things, but I’m pretty sure that the Savior of Mankind isn’t one of them. Also, one of the most deeply held tenets of American political philosophy is that we are a representative democracy and not a kingdom, thank you very much. It’s kind of why we fought that revolution.

The RNC, on the other hand, says that this is a tortured leap of logic. Obviously, when Reince said “new King,” he meant the “old King,” Jesus. Of course. How absurd of Trump’s critics to jump to the outrageous conclusion that Reince was being consistent in his definitions. Or, to state it another way, the only way that Reince’s words come out the way that he claims they should is for him to be guilty of equivocation. Indeed, it is even more extreme than that: “new” does not, by its very definition, ever mean “old.” It is the opposite of old.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that Reince actually believes that Trump is the Son of Man (although, I must confess that I frequently blurt out “Jesus Christ!” when I hear Trump speak), nor is it entirely outside of the realm of possibility that he is not showing a preference for an autocratic dictator to rule our land. However, all this fuss and feathers could have been avoided if Priebus had actually taken the time and effort to use his words wisely. Writing is very, very hard, because words are so important and have so many meanings. If our readers are able to understand what we’re saying only by using faulty logic, then we have committed faulty writing. So, the next time you feel like sending us a tweet, Reince, you should really make sure that you take the time to make it so clear that equivocation is unnecessary for us to get your intended meaning.

And now let’s look at our second holiday present from the GOP: Trump’s Boxing Day greeting.

Post Hoc, Ergo Poppy Cock

I tap a ball with my foot, and it rolls. The tap is the cause of the rolling—without that causation, the result would not take place. My dog enters the room, and the cat has a conniption. Again, causation and result. Causes produce consequences, in chronological order. First this, then that.

But sometimes, what looks like a cause isn’t a cause at all—it’s a coincidence.

In the morning, before I walk my dog, I deactivate my alarm system. It makes a cheery chirp, which my dog hears. Immediately afterward, he gets to go out for a walk. After a few weeks of this, I noticed that my dog starts wagging his tail and looking at me expectantly whenever I set or deactivate the alarm (it makes the same noise either way). He has come to think that the alarm causes the walk. In other words, he has mistaken a coincidence for causation simply because it proceeds that precious, precious walk. Puppy has committed post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this).

Puppy isn’t the only one who does this, of course. Believe it or not, we all do it. It’s why pitchers wear lucky socks. The appearance of a comet on the Bayeux tapestry is testimony to the false causation fallacy: innocently shooting across the sky before the disastrous events of 1066, Halley’s Comet is blamed for disruptions that take place on the earth below.

The fallout from the post hoc fallacy can be quite serious. Andrew Wakefield, a highly discredited British doctor, wrote a report purporting to establish a link between MMR vaccinations and autism. His basic argument was that the twelve kids he studied had the MMR shot before they developed autism. Therefore, the autism was caused by the MMR. Forget about the possibility of genetic factors, or the pathetically small sample size—if a doctor said it, it must be so (watch out for a future essay on the problems with appeals to authority). Even though the study was thoroughly debunked (and, in an extraordinary move by The Lancet, retracted by the journal that originally published it), the anti-vax league glued themselves to the report like barnacles on the rusty hull of a garbage scow (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/us/a-discredited-vaccine-studys-continuing-impact-on-public-health.html). As a result, twenty states have “philosophical exemptions” to vaccine requirements (as opposed to medical exemptions), and in those twenty states, thousands of children have gone unvaccinated. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/us/a-discredited-vaccine-studys-continuing-impact-on-public-health.html). At the risk of making my own post hoc, ergo propter hoc mistake, I’m willing to bet that there is a causal link between the decrease in vaccinations and the increase in the outbreak of preventable and potentially fatal diseases—and the Journal of the American Medical Association seems to agree with me (http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2503179).

So, now that we know what the post hoc fallacy is and how destructive they can be, let’s take a look at Trump’s characteristically humble greeting to his followers on 26 December, Boxing Day. Here’s what he said:

The world was gloomy before I won – there was no hope. Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!

Just by walking on the stage, it appears, Trump has been able to bestow hope, bolster retail sales, and heat up the stock market. He hasn’t made a single policy change, nor has he issued any executive order, and yet he is able to singlehandedly resuscitate a previously failing economy. Wow! Maybe Reince was right about Trump being the new Lamb of God after all, because there’s certainly something messianic about the claims he’s making.[1]

Outside of divine intervention, there is very little likelihood that Trump would have such a profound impact on the economy. Indeed, according to Team Trump, the source of the tweet was a Deloitte University Press projection that predicted in September that Christmas spending would exceed one trillion dollars—well before the world turned upside down on 8 November.[2] Furthermore, in its October Christmas sales forecast, the National Retail Federation (hardly a hotbed of leftist-pinko-socialist thinking) attributed the projected increase not to Trump’s election (which hadn’t taken place yet), but to “steady jobs and income gains (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/26/president-elect-donald-trump-claims-credit-for-higher-market-christmas-shopping.html).” Since the word “steady” indicates a trend that occurs over time, it would be reasonable to assume that the NRF was referring to events and policies that were in place well before Trump’s election. Further, the final figures are not yet in, so the trillion dollar projection might indeed be a bunch of hooey. It wouldn’t be the first time in 2016 that predictions went to hell in a hand basket, after all.

The increase in market activity did take place after Trump was elected, and there is some indication that it was in response to the election. But it isn’t clear why Trump had that effect, nor is it at all clear that the rally is sustainable (http://www.npr.org/2016/11/30/503902394/postelection-stock-market-rise-shocks-prominent-economists). Indeed, it seems quite likely that Trump caused the rally by not doing anything at all.[3] For example, noted billionaire investor and Trump supporter Carl Icahn has cautioned that the rally might be “overdone” because the optimism about Trumponomics that fueled the rally might not be sustainable. The infrastructure funding that he promised might not materialize, nor might he be able to carry out the deregulation of the investment banking industry. (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/carl-icahn-says-dial-back-on-stocks-as-trump-rally-looks-overdone-2016-11-17). So, ironically, Trump has caused a rally not because of what he has actually done, but because of what others believe he might do. In other words, there is no “hoc”—just a lot of “ergo-mania.”

So, where does that leave us?

Well, first of all, I think both tweets leave a lot to be desired in terms of clarity. Preibus, whether he intended to or not, convoluted the meaning of “new” to such an extent that it became utterly nonsensical. I stated in an earlier blog that it’s probably a good idea to avoid using modifiers, in order to prevent ad hominem attacks. Usually, just naming the noun should suffice. However, there are times when it is necessary to be precise, and so a modifier is justified. But here, the modifier appears to have been chosen precisely to cause imprecision and chaos. Who the hell knows what “new” means in this tweet?

Similarly, Trump’s tweet lacks clarity because he is using unverified projections to bolster his position that he has been a force for economic good simply by existing. He also neglects to mention that his “evidence” was published one to two months before his election—an excellent indication that his election had nothing to do with the brisk Christmas trade that the NRF was fervently praying for.

The lack of clarity is key: both tweets generated a lot of interest. But for all the heat that they inspired, there was precious little light. It would be interesting to see what stories these tweets obscured. For example, it appears that the nomination of Rep. Tom Price to be Secretary of Health and Human Services has caused a real ruckus amongst the medical profession—but who, besides a few policy nerds and Critical Thinking teachers, noticed (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/26/us/tom-price-hhs-donald-trump-cabinet.html)? It was much more fun, I’m sure, to write witty ripostes on the RNC and Trump twitter accounts than to keep an eye on what that wacky Trump transition team was getting up to.

And finally, we are again left with a feeling of profound gratitude to Trump and his supporters for providing us with yet another useful tool for examining logical fallacies. In these dark times, it is important to look for even the slightest glimmer of a silver lining.

[1] It is also interesting that both tweets refer to “hope.” In Priebus’s case, he was referring to the Son of God, while Trump, with great humility, was referring to himself. Even though Trump is a notorious non-reader of books (https://newrepublic.com/minutes/133566/donald-trump-doesnt-read-books), perhaps he took the time to read Priebus’s tweet before writing his own.

[2]Now that I think of it, is it possible that the Deloitte University Press is responsible for the election of Donald Trump? I mean, September is before November, after all.